There is still time to register for the upcoming FIRST Technical Colloquium April 2-3 2013. The event has a very exciting program covering, bitsquatting, webthreats, RPZ, Passive DNS, Real-world monitoring examples, Spamhaus, SIE, Cuckoo Sandbox, Malware Analysis and many more current issues facing the incident response community.
The event’s line-up includes notables from Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO), Internet Systems Consortium, Shadowserver foundation, KPN-CERT, NATO, MyCert and ING amongst others. Program details can be found here. Read More »
Ask anyone in the information security field they will tell you:
Security is not fair. There is essentially an unlimited supply of attackers that can test your defenses with impunity until they eventually succeed.
As a member of the Cisco Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) I’ve seen this asymmetry up close, so I can tell you that good security is really hard. Besides the normal security practices like deploying firewalls, IDS sensors, antivirus (AV), and Web Security Appliances, CSIRT is increasingly looking to the network as a data source. We have been collecting NetFlow for years but we have always wanted additional context for the flow data. While it is true that the Internet is built on TCP/IP, Internet services—both good and bad—are found by name using the Domain Name System (DNS). For years infosec has been network-address-centric and the attackers have adapted. Today it is very common to see malware command and control (C&C) use domain generation algorithms (DGAs), Peer-to-Peer (P2P), or even fast-flux DNS to evade IP address-based detection and blocking. It has become absolutely clear that to keep up with the latest attacks and attackers you must have a view into the DNS activity on your network.
CSIRT has been struggling with limited DNS information for a while now, so I am pleased to say we finally have comprehensive visibility into the DNS activity on our network. Before I dive into how we tackled this problem I should back up and explain a bit more about DNS…
As part of CSIRT’s mobile monitoring offering for special events, we undertook monitoring of the corporate and customer traffic of the Cisco House at the London 2012 Olympics. This engagement presents us with an excellent opportunity to showcase Cisco technology, while keeping a close watch on potential network security threats. CSIRT monitoring for this event will be active for the entire life-span of the Cisco House, from two months before the Olympics, until two months after.
For the London 2012 engagement, we shipped our gear in a 14RU military-grade rack that is containerized: made for shipping. Inside the mobile monitoring rack we have an assortment of Cisco kit and third-party kit that mirrors the monitoring we do internally:
Catalyst 3750 to fan out traffic to all the other devices
FireEye for advanced malware detection
Two Cisco IronPort WSA devices for web traffic filtering based on reputation
Cisco UCS box where we run multiple VMs
Lancope StealthWatch collector for NetFlow data
and a Cisco 4255 IDS for intrusion detection
We mirror the signatures that we have deployed internally at Cisco out to these remote locations. Depending on the environment where the mobile monitoring rack is deployed, we may also do some custom tuning. The kit in the mobile monitoring rack can do intrusion detection, advanced malware detection, and collect and parse NetFlow and log data for investigation purposes. The Cisco UCS rack server also helps us have several VMs, allowing us to run multiple tools that complement the other devices in the rack. For example, we run a Splunk instance on a VM to collect the logs generated by all the services. The data from the gear in the mobile monitoring rack is analyzed by our team of analysts and investigators, to eliminate false positives, conduct mitigation and remediation, and finally produce an incident report if required.
For corporations, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a widely publicized yet little understood topic. Does it exist? Is it a real threat? How can an organization tell if it is impacted?
The Cisco Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) is a global team of information security professionals responsible for the 24/7 monitoring, investigation and response to cyber security incidents for Cisco-owned businesses. CSIRT engages in proactive threat assessment, mitigation planning, incident detection and response, incident trending with analysis, and the development of security architecture. This article will provide the Cisco CSIRT team’s perspective on APT, and is the fifth in a series of blog posts on related issues from CSIRT’s point of view. As with the other posts, provided here are some real-world examples and techniques that will hopefully help organizations utilize existing tools and processes, or even understand gaps in security infrastructure. Read on to find out more.
This is the Forth part in the series “Missives from the Trenches.” (Here are the (first), (second), and(third) parts of the series.) In today’s blog post we will be discussing Cisco IOS Netflow. Netflow has an interesting position as being both the most useful and least used tool. When meeting with other companies I often ask them “do you use Netflow?” By asking this question I am actually asking several different questions--Do you care about the security of your site? Or do you have any hopes in managing/responding to events at your site? Answers to these questions unfortunately tend to be as follows: What is Netflow? The network guys use it but we don’t. I think we capture it somewhere but not really sure where -- and so on. I then mention that Netflow is free, they don’t have to buy anything to start using it, and it’s used for every large case we do. At that point they start looking angrily at the sales engineer asking why this is the first they are hearing about it. So what is Netflow and why does Cisco CSIRT say its critical to daily event management? Read on to find out!
